Say it along with me:
"My name is Elmer J. Fudd. I am a millionaire. I own a mansion, and a yacht."
Words ground into us on countless Saturday mornings, sprawled in feet pajamas before our black and white television sets.
It's an odd brain worm to have, in these times when inflation has made nearly meaningless the coveted 19th century benchmark of "millionaire" — 8 percent of the country are millionaires — while the truly wealthy continually shame themselves by their grasping for even more power and their displays of oblivious self-regard. But these are odd times.
"My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd..."
With that line tickling my ear, I regularly check my 401(k). I used to ignore it for weeks at a time. Now I look every day, sometimes more than once a day, rooting it on toward the empyrean.
Not without a few speed bumps. A week ago Monday, the words echoing in my head, I logged on, or tried to.
"My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd ... I am ... a millionaire..."
Instead of the latest update, I got this message:
What the heck is Cloudflare? No idea? And when had I blocked it? I didn't recall. I asked AI what I should do to unblock Cloudflare, and it told me to start wiping out caches and eliminating cookies. I'd just done that, a few weeks earlier, trying to correct some other unwelcome situation, and it's a pain in the ass. You have to sign into stuff all over again.
Instead I deployed one of my special magic strategies that often work with computers and everything else. I waited. And was rewarded by catching a news report on the radio that mentioned Cloudflare, some huge server system the specifics of which elude me, was down, sending ripples. It wasn't just me. Which is always a comfort. Indeed, as I went about getting my column ready, fact-checking and such, I got several of these messages:
Eventually I got into my 401(k), and had my traditional morning lick-lipping glance at the room of pillows I plan to flop into midway through 2027. Tuesday we crossed the Rubicon. And Elmer's voice whispered once again, tauntingly, in my ear.
A millionaire?
ReplyDeleteNot what it used to be
I don't know I guess being a millionaire means anybody who has over a million but up to 999 million.
Certainly seems like a big deal to me I certainly don't have a net worth of a million dollars including all of my assets.
I've worked really hard really hard for nearly 50 years.
I guess it's not a gauge of how hard you work.
I guess I'm part of the 92% of Americans who aren't millionaires.
I think that millionaires are truly wealthy and billionaires are extraordinarily wealthy obscenely really
I guess there's still time. I could start playing the lottery
I was told long ago by a wise fellow that you shouldn't look at your long term investments regularly, today doesn't reflect the long term and it will only make you anxious. So I didn't. The money was in conservative investments that, by design, can't lose value. I'm a liberal after all. When the Wall Street Ivy League boys playing with mortgages caused the economy to crater in 2008, I waited, then curiosity got the best of me. I looked at my portfolio and discovered that my conservative, can't lose value investments had lost value. It was like getting hit in the head with a hammer. Someone had screwed up. I don't think it was me. I immediately moved the money to a different money handler, and, frothing at the mouth, made it clear that it was to be in investments that can't go in reverse. As a result, I missed out on the gigantic bounce back gains in the years following the mortgage debacle. Some of us just have the touch.
ReplyDeleteWhat's so hard about, "Buy low, sell high"? If that's the way you want to live your life.
ReplyDeletetate
One problem is that not all things that are bought low ever get any higher, and some of them go even lower.
DeletePhilip Bump had a visualization in his 15 Nov column that stuck with me. He was pointing out how even celebrities are closer to poverty than the uber-wealthy. This, following news that James Van Der Beek auctioned off his memorabilia to pay for cancer treatment. Mr Bump likes to make map visualizations, so what he did was map out financial data as if it were on a map of NY City: 1 cm = 1 dollar. Starting at 0 dollars on 63rd street in Manhattan, you'd travel 4 blocks to Columbus Circle to arrive at the federal poverty level, and to 52nd St to reach median income in the US. $200,000 would get you to 38th St, and a million would put you in the harbor, between Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
ReplyDeleteBut the "poorest" billionaire would travel around the world, past Manhattan again, nearly circling the globe twice. And as for Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, his wealth would have him circling the globe 107 times.
Most of us would not trade our lives for Elon Musk's though. Though he and Trump monetize everything they can, thankfully, money isn't everything.
So mid 2027 is your unannounced, but privately official, retirement?
ReplyDeleteMy wife's older brother had to have spinal surgery in the late 90s, and it didn't help. He could no longer work. Had he continued as an electrician for a few more years, he would have retired as a millionaire.
ReplyDeleteHe and his wife lived in an ordinary suburban house, and he took trips to Disney World and Hawaii. My brother-in-law coached kids on the ice hockey rink. Just an ordinary joe. Lived comfortably for another quarter-century, probably on his union pension and his investments. Being a near-millionaire is not such a BFD anymore.
In his eighties, he had dementia. Went back to being a little kid again. Lived out his final months and final days in his own home, where his long-suffering wife and his two middle-aged sons were his primary caregivers. They endured years of hell.
Had a stroke two weeks ago. Died this past Sunday, at 86. Money won't save you.
But it tends to give you more choices, greater access to good doctors, private nursing and other in-home services, and a shot at the too scarce good nursing homes.
DeleteExtreme wealth won't save anyone from terminality, but it can ease the physical pain of the departure sans gory suicide.
https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ This site is useful for checking the status of websites up, down, or lost
ReplyDeleteInside my head, it's going: "My name is Elmer J Fudd... You killed my father... prepare to die!
ReplyDeleteWhen the (I think it was the) housing bubble burst (or maybe it was the dot-com bubble), my first thought was "stocks just went on sale!"
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I didn't have any independent-from-retirement accounts, so I wasn't able to take advantage of it. It did, however, make me open a mutual funds account, and it's chugged along since then with a small automatic deposit every month, and when there's a massive wailing in the news about "the stock market", I put some more cash into it. After all, stocks just went on sale.